'The nature of protesting is quite a bit more focused on partisan politics than it has been in the past'
Surrounded by women clad in hot pink pussyhats and carrying signs like "Resister" and "I march to honor my mother," Seth Warner stood in downtown Philadelphia in 2017 during the post-Inauguration Day Women's March, thinking one thing.
"The headline reason for the protest was around women's issues," he says. "But I figured a lot of people were also there because they didn't like the new president."
He held onto that thought throughout graduate school, and in his latest study concluded his hypothesis was correct: Hatred of the other party, "side," or candidate, whether Republican or Democrat, influences one's inclination to protest almost as much as concern about the protest issue itself.
Warner, an assistant professor in UConn's political science department, says his study, "Partisan animosity and protest participation in the United States," which was published this summer in the journal Social Forces, is significant because it offers researchers a reinterpretation of the reason people protest.
"People know that political polarization exists - that it's become touchier to talk about politics, that the stakes have seemed a lot higher the last 20 years than at earlier points in recent history," he says, "but what does that mean? This study is one of several efforts that are trying to determine the effect this polarization has had."
Protesting to be neighborly
Warner looked at a handful of national surveys from 2014 to 2022 that asked thousands of Americans about many things, including pointed questions about the Black Lives Matter, climate action, and tea party movements.
Waves of the surveys took place before any protests to solicit information like how respondents felt about either party, whether they believed humans have contributed to temperature increases, how they felt about racial inequality, and if the size of government was appropriate. The surveys then followed up over a number of years.
When accounting for things like respondents' interest in politics and political inclinations, Warner says he found that partisan animosity affected the inclination to protest, even if its effect varied between the issues.
Climate change protesters, for instance, were spurred to action more by partisanship than policy concerns. For tea party and Black Lives Matters protesters, the effect of partisanship was present but less pronounced, between half and two-thirds that of policy concerns.
Protest is becoming a really big feature of American politics, and it's not for the reasons that people would expect. — Professor Seth Warner
"Researchers have always known that protest might not be as much about issues as the public would assume," Warner says.
For instance, one older study of the anti-abortion movement that Warner looked at found that friendship was a driver in getting someone to attend an anti-abortion protest.
A group of congregants from the same church or members of the same community organization decide to attend for the sake of being socially together, even if some in the group have moderate, nuanced views on abortion access, he describes. The size of the group might suggest an overwhelming feeling, but many attend mostly to be social.
"Context plays a big role in the way people behave, and it's something that quantitatively we're still figuring out how best to model," he says. "We need to figure out where their motivation comes from – to what extent is it theirs and to what extent is it from the water they swim in?"
'Light organizing' helps make protests more common
Data shows the number of protests in the United States has only grown since 2016 and the number of people joining is up too, Warner notes. Just visit Main Street, Anywhere, USA, and you're likely to find a group of people with signs outside the library or in the park on any given Saturday.
"Protest is becoming a really big feature of American politics, and it's not for the reasons that people would expect," he says. "Partisan animosity is a very central factor in why people protest, at least in the present era of the late 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s. That's important because more people are protesting than ever before."
Warner says some of this is thanks to changes in how protests are organized.
Scholars use the term "heavy organizing" when talking about much of the activism in the 20th century, Warner explains, because it involved an organized group having to select a date, secure a permit, assign duties to members, pass out flyers, and talk with the press.
With the digital technology of today, along with a decline in the social capital of the past, many more recent events are the product of "light organizing," he notes.
Someone posts on social media they're going to be on the town green at this time on this day, enough followers get revved up and like the post, which pushes it into other people's feeds, and almost organically a protest just happens at that time on that day.
Light organizing has changed the focus of protests as well, he adds.
An 'incredible menagerie of discontent'
Due to its institutional origins, heavy organizing generally focuses on a single topic: Black congregants of a church may want to focus on civil rights, or a theologically conservative church may want to focus on abortion. Light organizing means people fired up about any number of issues show up.
"It's going to be whatever is on everybody's mind," Warner says. "And that's not to say it can't be on a specific topic like we saw with the George Floyd protests, but it's often going to be 'I really hate the president,' whether that president is Joe Biden or Donald Trump."
Warner says the No Kings protest in June was a good example: "The unifying factor was folks didn't like Donald Trump. The nature of protesting is quite a bit more focused on partisan politics than it has been in the past."
Take the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Eruptions around the country six decades ago may have had roots in generational conflict in addition to what was happening in southeast Asia, he suggests.
National leaders from the Silent Generation who fought in World War II and grew to become conservative in their thinking couldn't understand the more liberal attitudes of their baby boom children who rejected war, especially in a place far from home.
"Sure, partisan dynamics might not be totally absent from the 1960s in the Vietnam movement, but because there was so much more overlap between the parties ideologically - Southern Democrats, liberal Northern Republicans - I don't know that partisan divides would have motivated people in the same way they do now," Warner says.
Today's social and political landscape might be best described as an "incredible menagerie of discontent," he says. And scholars are curious about its effect.
"This study shows that this huge upswell of protest is one artifact of polarization," he says. "Without a doubt, the grievances that the protests have often very legitimate. But there is a minority of people who really hate the other party, and while everybody else is hiding from politics a little bit, they're becoming more active.
"We see that on the streets when people protest Donald Trump or Joe Biden or COVID restrictions or racial injustice," he continues. "Some of these are issues that would be protested or criticized regardless, but the extent of what we're seeing is in part because we're as polarized as we are."
